Ieper, Belgium-based developer of commercial voice processing products Lernout & Hauspie Speechproducts NV has established US headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. The $9m-a-year company’s US operations currently comprise three people, headed by general manager Bart Verheaghe. Lernout’s products are designed to enable computers and machines to understand and produce human speech in different languages. Its flagship product, just launched in the US, is a multi-lingual speech board for personal computers. And, according to the company, the 901PIM-C25 personal computer board is the first to integrate three critical speech processing technologies – the conversion of natural human voice analogue signals to digital signals, capable of being processed by a computer; the conversion of written words to computer-generated speech; and speech recognition. Languages supported by the text-to-speech capabilities currently include American English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish. And support for Far Eastern languages – initially Cantonese, Hangoul, Hindi, Kanji, Malay, Mandarin and Thai – is under development for speech recognition and text-to-speech. The Lernout products recognise the numbers nought to nine as well as typical commands for computer menu and application operations. Words, commands and numbers can be recognised both locally and over the phone. To date in Europe, Lernout’s products – multi-function, multilingual personal computer board and speech processing modules, algorithms, applications development software and bundled systems – are used in telephone banking, mail order response, and voice mail applications. Lernout & Hauspie aims to expand geographically via joint ventures with marketing and sales companies and additional investors.
